Lilach Bullock: HubSpot Case Study

Lilach Bullock is a business, high-performance, and mindset coach. Lilach helps entrepreneurs grow and scale their businesses. Her podcast, “The Lilach Bullock Show”, focuses on business entrepreneurship, tech tours, marketing, and sales. She has had high-profile interviews with people like Neil Patel and Evan Carmichael.

The Podcast Challenge For Lilach

When Lilach first launched her podcast, she realised it required a lot of work, from editing to converting it into other forms of content. All this effort to manage the podcast would involve an additional cost.

Lilach’s main goal was to make the cost back on the podcast. Then, in the long-term, to make a profit from the podcast so she can continue creating great content. Also, to attract high-profile guests to the podcast show.

Many people told Lilach that she would not get podcast sponsorship until she had high downloads/stats etc. The consensus about acquiring sponsorship for a brand-new podcast with zero stats was negative.

The Unique Solution To Gain Podcast Sponsorship

After analysing the situation, Lilach decided to “ignore all the naysayers”. She worked on the principle that if you don’t ask, you don’t get. She researched and put together a list of 2,500 tech tool companies to approach about sponsorship.

Lilach created a podcast brochure detailing how tech companies could become early bird sponsors. The sponsors could also appear on the show, also leverage her email list and blog posts.

She worked hard to get valuable guests to the podcast that would interest people to listen in. Lilach made a conscious effort to “work with what she had as opposed to what she did not have.”

Lilach did not want to send the first contact as a generic cold email campaign mainly because of traditional low open rates. For example, for every 2,000 names on a list, statistics show you are generally lucky to get an open rate of around 20%.

Lilach’s idea was to leverage HubSpot to see if it could help her achieve her podcast sponsorship goals. There was an additional challenge, though, as Lilach’s current HubSpot account did not have an email sequences option.

Lilach contacted HubSpot directly to explain her situation with the podcast and to see what they could do for her. HubSpot kindly offered to upgrade Lilach’s HubSpot account for a free trial for two weeks.

The unique solution was to “use the power of HubSpot” and the email sequences option on HubSpot to contact the 2,500 tech companies. HubSpot allows Lilach to send automated emails to tech companies and organise them in a set sequence.

The Power Of HubSpot And The Follow Up

Lilach explained that you must be thick-skinned when you do cold email campaigns and want to promote something. True to form, most people did not respond to her email. Also, companies that did respond asked about “the numbers” for the podcast.

She then had to explain to these companies that she didn’t have the numbers, and that was why she was offering an early-bird offer to the company. A few companies said yes, and Lilach made £30,000 of podcast sponsorship within three to five days.

The HubSpot free trial ended up being mutually beneficial for Lilach and HubSpot. It was an incredibly successful campaign using email sequencing with HubSpot. Lilach decided to upgrade her HubSpot account as a result.

Also, Lilach was happy she had ignored other people's advice about securing podcast sponsorship. Trying a new, fresh approach had worked in her favour and helped her get the results she needed for the podcast.

Since using the email sequences for the initial podcast sponsorship campaign, Lilach now uses the sequences for different areas of her business. It saves her so much time as everything is automated.

She believes that HubSpot is incredibly powerful. Lilach said in business, “the money is in the follow-up”. Lilach coaches many companies and entrepreneurs and has seen that behind the scenes, they are not following up on leads.

It can be for several reasons, such as:

• Do not have time
• Do not want to do it
• Worried about being perceived as being “naggy”
• Put it off
• Leave it too long to make the follow-up

HubSpot makes a huge difference. Because the emails are automated, it takes the headache out of doing it, and you get better results. Lilach said she “Highly recommends HubSpot for the sequencing alone”.

HubSpot has helped her to streamline and organise her work. Before HubSpot, Lilach used manual systems, such as spreadsheets. She had delayed automating everything as she was a solopreneur and needed to watch her costs.

Lilach also enjoys using HubSpot as it is so user-friendly. Anybody can pick it up as it is so intuitive. Lilach says she is “a huge advocate for HubSpot” and has been using it for the last 3-4 years.

In the future, she is also interested in using HubSpot for its email marketing functions. She currently uses Convertkit as a separate tool. Using HubSpot’s email marketing system can take her business to an even higher level.